Proposed changes to default applications in 16.04 LTS

[Will Cooke]

Hi all,

Following the desktop team sprint in October and the UOS session last week
I wanted to quickly follow up on some proposed changes to the default
install and gather any feedback.

Brasero -  to be removed from the image and put into Universe.  The
rationale here is that little development or maintenance is happening
upstream, there are some bugs/issues which are yet to be fixed upstream and
its importance is diminished with the adoption of USB thumb drives.  Very
few people are writing CDs/DVDs these days and those who need it can still
install Brasero from the archive.

Empathy - to be removed from the image and put into Universe.  The
rationale here is again it's largely unmaintained now and that fewer chat
services can used with Empathy, because services such as Facebook are
moving everything back to their websites and away from XMPP.

Gnome Calendar - to be added to the image.  This brings a stand-alone
Calendar application with integration with Unity.


I expect these changes to have little impact on the majority of users but
please let us have your feedback.

Cheers, Will
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Re: Proposed changes to default applications in 16.04 LTS

[Bryan Quigley]

Hi,

> Brasero -  to be removed from the image and put into Universe.
+1 (the USC reviews shows it has been going downhill for a while)

> Empathy - to be removed from the image and put into Universe.
+1 (

> Gnome Calendar - to be added to the image.  This brings a stand-alone
> Calendar application with integration with Unity.
I've been reviewing this since the UOS, and I'd prefer to go with
xul-ext-lightning calendar integrated into Thunderbird instead.  It's
definitely more tested and feature complete and Mozilla actually
started including it by default in upstream builds in v38.   It's
already used by enterprises and we can expect it to be around and
supportable in 5 years.

Negatives of xul-ext-thunderbird
It is bigger ~6MB vs 1.5MB.
It's not standalone.
Doesn't integrate with the date applet.  (The last two might be fixable)

Thoughts?

Kind regards,
Bryan

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/38.0.1/releasenotes/

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